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It’s been predicted that the world will experience a severe oil shortage, starting ten years from now. One way to handle this would be to develop alternate fuels. What’s more likely to happen is that countries will burn coal instead, because there’s plenty of that left. However, scientists say that high pollution levels, of the kind caused by burning coal, make people more likely to have a stroke.

Scientists in Taiwan found there are higher hospital admission rates when pollution is high, especially in host weather. Particulates and nitrogen dioxide seem to be the main causes. Previous research shows a link between air pollution and death rates from respiratory and heart disease.
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A man exploring a crop circle in Iowa discovered that a dog refused to go inside it. Unusual levels of electrical activity have often been reported inside crop circles, and dogs may be more sensitive to this than humans are. It’s recently been discovered that dogs are sensitive to impending earthquakes.

Twelve years ago, Jim Hodges received a strange phone call. He says, “It was the sheriff calling to tell me there had been a report of a crop circle near Blue Grass. I drove out there and went up into a silo with the farmer and, boy, there it was?a beautiful circle in a mature corn field.”
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Some heavily advertised products actually do you more harm than good. A recent study shows that sunscreens are totally worthless, but using them makes people complacent, so they spend more time in the sun, which can lead to skin cancer. And taking too many antacids can lead to dangerous food allergies.
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Andi Bell, of the U.K., is the 2002 world memory champion. He can memorize the order of 10 shuffled packs of playing cards?520 cards in all?in only 20 minutes. Those of us who can’t remember where we left our car keys have a lot to learn from him.
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